'Sickening' paedophilia books rock French literary world

The first scandal of France's week-old literary season has erupted over two violent and sexually explicit novels whose heroes are an obsessive paedophile and a perverted serial killer with a preference for very young girls, including his two-year-old daughter.

Publishers and a number of authors are defending the works on the grounds that violence, whether sexual or not, is an intrinsic part of contemporary society and writers are only doing their job by addressing the subject.

Child protection groups and a number of critics, including Alexis Liebaert, from the news magazine Marianne, who called the books 'sickening, unacceptable, pornographic and above all entirely devoid of literary merit', say the novels are dangerous and offensive and deliberately set out to court scandal to improve sales.

The respected publishing house of Gallimard has decided not to re-supply bookshops with one of the works, Rose Bonbon by Nicolas Jones-Gorlin, after a children's rights group, L'Enfant bleu, said it risked 'shocking both public opinion and victims of paedophilia'.

Gallimard's editorial director, Teresa Crimisi, said the company had published the work for its literary merit and would not withdraw Rose Bonbon from sale.

But the publisher had decided to suspend new deliveries of the book 'in a spirit of appeasement and because we do not want the scandal to boost sales for the wrong reasons,' she said.

Jones-Gorlin has defended his novel, which recounts in explicit detail the paedophile activities of a thirtysomething travelling salesman with a series of girls aged between seven and 10. 'I knew of course that it was a sensitive subject, but I did not think I would find the anti-paedophile associations lined up against me,' he said.

'My character is not a sympathetic one and the book also shows the complaisance that can often surround paedophilia. The book contains a genuine critique of society.'

The second novel, Il Entrerait dans la Légende (He will enter into legend) by Louis Skorecki, risks causing even more of an uproar. In 2,323 horrifying scenes, including several dozen murders, it tells the story of a sadistic serial killer 'propelled into crime by his absolute love of women and little girls'.

L'Enfant bleu and another children's rights association, La Fondation pour l'Enfance, are still reading the book, which was published last week, and have said they will not hesitate to go to court to ban it in an attempt to 'ring the alarm bell as loudly as possible so that this kind of literature does not prosper'.

Both authors have, however, received unexpected support in the shape of the League of Human Rights, which said: 'Denying authors the right to address, in a work of fiction, social phenomena like paedophilia constitutes a serious violation of the right to freedom of expression.'